Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

Thanks guys. It's been a rough 8 months so far. Bought a new laptop so I can continue working on the game while at work (currently waiter/cashier/janitor at a buddy's restaurant, either working on Papilio, digital painting or gaming during downtime).

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

Working on polishing and correcting camera movement and events in stages 5-7 before beginning work on enemy design and placement.

Stage 7's background still needs coding work.

I also managed to fix a strange bug in Stage 4 that displayed the furthermost layer of the background from Stage 2's boss fight instead of a black void for some reason, which also caused it to overlap the pulsating crystal wall background. Turns out background indices seem to have an integer equivalent.

Currently working on redrawing several level tiles for seamless display. The way D3D handles GM:S's tile drawing requires me to treat each block as a texel and include bleeds at the edges, or seams will appear like they now do in stage 4. I wonder if any of the other GMS users here (Rozyrg, BPzeBanshee, etc.) have had any issues with this and if they've fixed it with surfaces? I might be forced to introduce surface usage soon if anything.

EDIT: I managed to fix the tile seam issue by experimenting with redrawing an entire set of tiles for bleed allowances, but now I have to replace almost all the tiles in my levels. Fun times!

I'll have to have a chat with Kaiser about this one as I've not really used tiles in GMOSSE at all, but we've used it for displaying walls and large detailed one-off backgrounds as tiles in our newest game project together. This is probably a no-brainer but make sure you're not interpolating textures either.

EDIT:Is this the kind of bleed issue that you're talking about or am I misinterpreting here? If so it's from having a total background image smaller than what the total size of all your tiles adds up to be.

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

BPzeBanshee wrote:

Is this the kind of bleed issue that you're talking about or am I misinterpreting here? If so it's from having a total background image smaller than what the total size of all your tiles adds up to be.

Yep, that's the one. I found a fix for the seams that appear on tiles though:

The thing is, doing this to my tiles messes up the in-game display due to the resultant differences in tile indices, so I have to manually replace everything. It's a lot easier now with the "hide other tile layers" option in the Room Editor though.

That sounds very overelaborate compared to what we did to fix it - we just simply made sure the size of the tiles evenly divided the background. I deliberately triggered the issue in that picture by borking the tile size so the last tile at the bottom went past the length of the background.

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

BPzeBanshee wrote:

we just simply made sure the size of the tiles evenly divided the background

Thanks, I was wondering why it was also appearing on my non-tilesheet background images, will fix . Although I may still need to do bleeds for the tilesheets to avoid artifacts popping up when the screen is scaled improperly--the glitchy artifacts from improperly-drawn tile sheets seem to be connected to viewport vs. screen port size, since it was also showing up on an experimental roguelike game I'm working on in my spare time whenever I chose to display the screen port using certain resolutions (the game has no image-based backgrounds, only tiles for drawing the map).

Also, from what I understand, larger tiles will also require larger bleeds, but I have yet to experiment. Currently it's working nicely in Stage 4 with the repaired 64x64 tiles used to draw the cave...although yes, it is kinda overelaborate. x_x

EDIT: I removed the background image artifacts by unchecking "Tile Vertically" on the Background Properties menu, for images that aren't supposed to be tiled vertically. It was an oversight from GM8 I think.

One other thing to be aware of - you can actually define the size of your texture atlas now, and if you go too small for it I've heard that can visually screw things as well. Look in game preferences for that one. I doubt it'll make a difference in your particular case but since you're doing large res stuff I figured you'd oughta know.

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

Tile replacement has been completed...only for me to find out that the whole thing was a result of the horizontal/vertical tiling tickers being checked on the tiles. Turning it off removed the artifacts. Derp.

In any case my twitter is active now, and some of my updates are posted there. Stage 8's backgrounds and tilesets are almost complete along with the new enemy sprites, and I'm now working on the bosses.

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

BPZeBanshee informed me that someone bumped this thread. x)

I'm planning to start a new thread sometime this year in order to apologize for the huge delay and explain what happened during the 4 year hiatus, as well as to unveil the new version which is being worked on right now. Suffice to say that almost all assets barring music have been completed during the hiatus and are now in the game, and most of my remaining responsibilities involve coding the last few stages and bosses.

Stage 5 is 95% complete with a fully functional boss (it just needs re-balancing because the level is ungodly HARD), Stage 6 is around 60% complete (midbosses and endboss are currently being worked on during my after-work downtime) and 7 and 8 are pending, but have almost all graphical assets at the ready barring a few things.

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

Quick update post:

I would first like to apologize deeply for the long hiatus. There were too many things going on in my personal life and I have had to focus on office/restaurant work since I last posted updates for v0.5.2, on top of my family generally being unsupportive of me working on Papilio. Can't blame them though; depression and other such issues also stood in the way, and it resulted in a lot of procrastination which is largely my fault. It became a vicious cycle that lasted quite a while.

That being said, I did manage to squeeze out work on Papilio over 2016-2018. Since most of the assets and coding (like 90-95%) were being handled by myself it was a long grind, but I got a lot of things finished. Huge thanks to BPzeBanshee who helped me troubleshoot some of the more problematic aspects and who allowed me to adapt some of his material from G.M.O.S.S.E.

I am currently doing some last minute checks for the new game features, and after that I will be releasing Papilio v0.9.0 over this weekend God willing. Here's what to expect:

* 4 new levels, including the final level* Tons of new enemies and bosses* A new risk-reward scoring mechanic, based around sacrificing your shields by using your bomb for a multiplier bonus

Take note that there's a number of things missing from the game as of yet, namely some new music, new weapons and the true last boss.

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

The new version is out! More details to follow on the main page soon...I'm rather exhausted at the moment and need to go to bed.

Get it here at my itch.io page. Please be advised that the free demo was made using an outdated version of Game Maker and will be updated within the coming week to accommodate newer Windows machines and avoid some sound driver-related crashes.

EDIT: I replaced the file on the store page due to a fatal crash that occurs in Stage 3, caused by an undeclared variable.

Also, I am giving away 5 free copies of the game on itch.io for the first 5 people to PM me (based on timestamps).

Joined: 18 Jan 2010Posts: 440Location: Frying over a jungle and saving the nature

Thanks for the feedback! Sorry I wasn't able to get on it yesterday, had to go to phys therapy.

Quote:

When launching the game for the first time, it launches four pop-ups saying that a hiscore file wasn't found; probably only one should be launched?

Actually there's supposed to be four, but this is a relic from a time when I couldn't figure out how to save all four highscore tables in a single file and then encrypt it without the data turning into a big mess... :p

I used to be able to avoid the popups by including the files in the archive, but now that GMS autosaves things in AppData\Local\ there's a chance I might break things if I do that and cause the files to be overwritten. I'll look into how to clean it up.

Quote:

On that same first-time launch (and only then), when exiting the following window pops up: